Has anyone tried making these guys work as of late? I’ve been trying them in a Kate deck as the main breakers, and it’s actually been working surprisingly well, as either one gets me into any one deep server, and with datasucker plus parasite recursion I can almost always keep all servers at 2 ICE or less. Any thoughts on using this breaker suite?

If I really wanted to make them work, the one “wallpaper”-level card I would actually consider using with Alpha + Omega would be Unscheduled Maintenance. If you can only install one piece per turn and need to protect several servers, it should take quite a while before Alpha and Omega lose their effectiveness (especially if you add ICE destruction to the mix). I’d probably attempt this out of Criminal, since Omega has very good synergy with Inside Job (and Special Order is fine for A+O fetching purposes). Given the explosiveness of Criminal openings, the high credit cost should be somewhat more manageable, too.

The inherent flaw with these breakers is of course, their high install cost and low strength against the fact that they appear to be early aggression/face-checking ICE. For the price, its very hard to get them to work, and if you’re comboing with Test Run, it seems unlikely that they are a) the best breaker for the job, and b) going to be hard cast for 7 if you don’t scavenge them.

I will say that, there is a corner case for them as late game breakers depending on your strategy, the nasty ICE tends to be on top of central towers, and the bottom of remotes, if you find yourself ignoring one or both of those in the early to mid phases of the game. I think despite their names and simultaneous release, they probably shouldn’t be run as a suite, but complementing a rig that tends to have a lot of outer/inner ICE unrezzed mid-late game.

Omega can reliably inside job through two ICE, which ain’t bad (and feint through three), and Iain could easily have a lot of inner ICE unrezzed if he was sitting back waiting for the corp to score, and the money to get it going.

I’ve seen stimshop be able to get them out quick enough, but its still debateable that they are the best breakers for the job, even if you’ve got them out early.

Program (2)

Whether it’ll be playable, I have no idea. Thinking of this as a rough draft of a v0.2, really. The core concepts seem workable to me, at least. There’s still wiggle room here, both slot- and influence-wise, which is probably a good sign.

(one version, which frankly seemed more boring to me, was “lose both copies of Opus, lose Alpha, lose Feedback Filter and both Lawyer-ups, add three Parasites, two Datasuckers and a Kati”. Maybe that would be better, dunno)

Omega has an interesting synergy with Parasite recursion decks now some immortal ice is around: inevitably, a piece of ice that is a impossible to bring down with a Parasite (Lotus Field, Architect) will end up slipping down to the root of the server as ice is destroyed. Omega can then be used to slice through it. You’d need a way to survive facechecks, but it makes for an interesting solution (though not necessarily playable).

Here is a list I just mocked up. Notable differences are the lack of multi-access, since Iain is all about precision, I would hate to have my economy crushed by accidentally getting to 4 points too early and not being able to keep up for the rest of the game. So instead, you want cheap R&D lock, and be able to keep it up every turn. Rooks go on the inside of remotes, central only’s are for you know, centrals. Security Testing and Compromised Employees help you keep up whether the corp is leaving servers naked, or rezzing everything in sight.

Crescentus was left in after the first round of cuts that had Autoscripter, thinking that sexy new toy would make all of criminals disposable programs much more nimble, but decided that the deck is probably too slow and that all the disposable cards might run out of steam. Crescentus stayed because of how important it is for you to control the size and shape of ICE towers, so anything big in the middle has to be taken care of, but without parasite I worry about cards like NEXT Silver or Hive ravaging my rooks.

Following Peekays logic, I switched my influence loadout in my Kate deck to 3 parasite, 2 datasucker, 2 unscheduled maintenance (thank you for the heads up on that card), 1 grimoire, and 1 of either stimhack or femme, althought I’m leaning towads femme as I’m already running test runs and scavenges. The singleton grimoire has been fantastic for me as its 2mu and boost to parasite recursion is just amazing, and with trade-in, I reliably see it even with just one copy.

That does sound like another good approach - the lack of recursion was why I decided against the parasites in my Crim version. Definitely curious about your field results, though I’d be a bit worried about the lack of HQ threat with your inf loadout - maybe one Parasite could become an HQ interface? Another Trade-in target, and more threat.

Alternatively, another card I think would be extremely strong with A+O (even more than it already is in normal circumstances) is Escher - if there’s any pieces that aren’t must-breaks (think Pup, Pop-up, Shadow, the like), just move those to the middle of the server sandwich. That would also increase your HQ threat level, forcing some more icing.

I had good times a couple of packs ago running these out of Nasir. You can get them early, and they go through most ice for res cost or less. I tried it with False Echos and Shutdown rather than parasite though. Parasite would probably have been better but I definitely felt I was onto a good thing.

I’ve been having decent success against both RP and NEH, as I can’t overstate how powerful an early Alpha/Omega is, as you can pressure every server and easily get through almost all early game cheap ICE with either one of them. Add in an early Unscheduled Maintenance, and you can make it very hard for the corporation to ever have enough ICE to matter. Also, parasite recursion neuters almost all taxing ICE that RP runs, and by the time they get stabilized with a tollbooth or something on the table, you can just femme it and keep going.

Worth noting is that according to Lukas, Aplha (and by extension, Omega, but it’s really corner case) check the ICE location at 3.1 in the Run timing chart, so ICe destruction is great for decks running these 'breakers.

Here’s what I’ve been running on and off for the last few months, trying to get them to work:

Chakana and Paricia are the 2 cards slated as “free slots”; In my local meta I was testing them as answers to NEH. They could easily be swapped out for Kraken or False Echo (as per the BGG thread), or anything else really.

If you’d rather move the multi-access to Hardware or Events, obviously the Djinn-Grimoire-Vrius build could be removed for Astrolabe, etc (which is likely my plan when I get Up and Over in-hand).

The deck has performed well for me locally; according to my notes ~55% win rate. It’s not straightfoward in piloting (eg: try and overdraw if you land a breaker coz you want to TestRun/Scavenge it from the Heap, drawing 2 cards) and it’ll probably get torn up n competitive play, but even with my locals knowing the deck I can usually keep myself well in the game.